Journal of Tribal Intellectual Collective India

ISSN 2321-5437

JTICI Vol.4, Issue 3, No.2, pp. 16 to 25, October 2017

Decolonizing Research in the Himalayan Region

Mabel Denzin Gergan

Introduction

If we bring a small country like Sikkim within our fold by using force, it would be like killing a fly with a bullet. (Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, The Statesman, 3 June 1960 in Datta-Ray 1984)

But what will be saved for coming generations? What is Sikkim’s future? Certainly it is overshadowed by the Red China-India struggle; Mr. Nehru calls this “a drama of which only the beginnings have been seen and no one knows what the end will be.” Sikkim’s tranquility could be swept away overnight. (Doig, National Geographic 1963:429)

I have no words when [the] Indian army was sent today in a surprise attack on Sikkim Guards who are less than 300 strong and were trained, equipped and officered by [the] Indian army who looked upon each other as comrades…This is a most treacherous and black day in the history of democratic India in solving the survival of our little country by use of arms. (The 12th Chogyal [Monarch] to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, 9 April 1975 in Datta-Ray 1984)

These three quotes, briefly and dramatically, encapsulate how the “little country” of Sikkim, an independent Buddhist monarchy bordering Nepal, China, and Bhutan, became the 22nd state of India in 1975. While this hostile breach of trust by the Indian State took the 12th monarch of Sikkim, Palden Thondup Namgyal by surprise, similar events had already been unfolding elsewhere in the world. The massive wave of decolonization spurred by World War II saw many newly independent Asian, African, and Latin American countries, frantically attempting to consolidate their territorial integrity. As Krishna (1996) points out this “cartographic anxiety” (509) was especially heightened at the territorial margins, where encounters between the state and its frontiers can be seen as indicative of “the contested and tortured production of sovereign identity” (508). What then becomes of places like Sikkim that find their nascent aspirations for sovereignty crushed, replaced instead by a regional identity that must now exist as a margin to an imagined core? And how are we to understand this history while contending with the multiplicity of ways people at the margins both desire and resist the state? While much of postcolonial scholarship grapples with the effects of Euro-Western colonization in the Indian sub-continent, how are we to write about places like Sikkim, for whom the Indian state is as much a colonizer as other imperial powers.

In this article, I suggest, that to write about spaces like Sikkim is to write from the margins not just of state power but also of dominant epistemologies. Knowledge production from the epistemic margins is what many scholars refer to as the ‘decolonizing project’ (and while related should not to be mistaken with the process of decolonization post world war II). Decoloniality as a theoretical framework emerged from Latin American critiques of modernity but now extends far beyond it and refers to the politics of knowledge production both within and beyond academia (Tuhwai Smith 1999) that require confronting “epistemologies of unknowing” that are a product of a “colonial insistence on epistemic mastery and refusal of heterogeneous ways of knowing.” (Vimalassery et al 2016). In this article, I discuss some challenges in producing scholarship about the Himalayan borderlands and provide background to Sikkim and the Dzongu reserve, the focus of my doctoral research. Sikkim’s recent inclusion within the Indian state makes it an important site of analysis given the myriad ways in which borderland spaces are contested and enrolled in nation-building projects. I close by suggesting a few avenues of future research in the Himalayan region that could be well suited for the decolonial endeavor.

The Marginality of South Asian Borderlands

At the heart of any decolonizing endeavor, is an acknowledgement and engagement with the multiple erasures and silences left in the wake of a colonial encounter, and requires according to Mingolo (2012) an “epistemic disobedience” and a “border epistemology”. Borderland spaces like the Himalayan region are a crucial site for decolonial theorizing in the South Asian context due to their geographic and epistemic distance from ‘mainland’ India. Despite the Himalayan region’s geo-political and ecological significance, like many frontier spaces, it exists at the conceptual peripheries of knowledge production. Schendel (2002:652) critiques the Euro-centric impulse behind Area Studies which subsumes peripheries of regional heartlands, “under the scholarly rubric of an ‘area’ only to be ignored, othered, made illegible.” He argues that the institutional structure of Area Studies has been predicated on the marginalization of certain regions and types of knowledges. Schendel (2013) notes elsewhere that in the case of South Asia, borderlands studies have been slow to develop because of a “methodological nationalism” prevalent among social scientists as well as state restrictions that made ‘sensitive’ areas out of bounds for research. This “methodological nationalism”, implies a reading of the margins through the lens of the Indian nation state, a process wherein the nation-state is assumed to be “the natural context and container for all social and political processes” (Gellner 2013:2). In a similar vein, Shneiderman (2013:29) writing in the context of Nepal, argues that most scholarship attempting to understand the process of state-formation in this region focuses either on “the Indic” or “the Tibetan”, placing them in opposition to each other when what is required is “an astute examination of the contingencies of political history and nationally-specific trajectories in the Himalayan region, as well as the recognition of the cultural, linguistic and religious fluidity that defines the lived experience of many border citizens.”

Within geography, my disciplinary home, while there has been a long tradition of borderland studies, the focus has primarily been on North America and Europe, partly due to disciplinary Euro-centricism and partly due to the relatively newer borders of post-colonial regions (Gellner 2013). A recent corrective to this disciplinary oversight in geography, can be found in Cons and Sanyal’s (2013:2) special issue in Political Geography, which engages South Asian borders as “margins of the state and nation, places at once removed from and central to debates about identity, security, risk, and survival.” Historically, both the northwestern and northeastern fringes of the British India consisted of kingdoms with dynamic cultures and histories of trade with neighboring regions, which suddenly found themselves cut off, isolated, and in a relationship of dependency to the core. At present, geo-political and geo-physical particularities of the Himalayan region inform both official and popular understandings of this region as sensitive, remote, and peripheral to ‘mainland’ India. This understanding also informs how the region’s inhabitants and their cultures are viewed as untouched, archaic, and hence, exotic. This becomes especially pertinent in conversations around racial discrimination against people from the Himalayan region (including North-East) in Indian cities, which is deeply informed by these legacies of racialization.

Scholars examining the Himalayan region as it exists marginal to state power, have drawn on the influential framework of ‘Zomia’, originally conceptualized by historian Willem Van Schendel (2002) and later popularized by James Scott (2009). Schendel (2002:653) demarcates Zomia as a contiguous area that covers parts of South Asia, Central Asia and East Asia and derives the name from zomi, “a term for highlander in a number of Chin-Mizo-Kuki languages spoken in Burma, India and Bangladesh.” Despite having many of the required criterions, such as language affinities, spiritual traditions, ancient trade networks, this geographic area failed to qualify as a region within traditional area studies. One of the main reasons for this failure according to Schendel is that Zomia includes politically marginal areas that actively resisted projects of nation-building and state-making. Highlander communities were often excluded from “discourses of citizenship, and cast in the roles of non-nationals, alien elements, or poachers of the state’s forestry resources who could be redeemed only by assimilating to the lowland ‘mainstream” (Schendel 2002: 655). James Scott took up Zomia with great enthusiasm in his 2009 book on peasant and subaltern forms of resistance in The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Extending Schendel’s conceptualization, Scott argues that Zomia comprises of state-evading societies and cultures that in their attempt to keep the state at bay create a “non-state space” or “zones of refuge”. While both Schendel and Scott do not extend the Zomia region to include the Central and Northern Himalayan region, scholars like Shneiderman (2010: 290) believe that the concept has great analytical value for those interested in the entire Himalayan massif and provides “a new framework within which the historically strong focus of Himalayan studies on highland peripheries may be productively united with a more contemporary concern for the political histories of national formations and their ‘state effects’.”

While acknowledging the importance of the Zomia conceptualization, many scholars have also critiqued it in the light of both contemporary and historical political realities. Karlsson (2013) writing in the context of North-East India notes that physiographic specificities and inter-ethnic relations have had a stronger influence on highlander political and cultural life than “state-evading” impulses. He also argues that the Zomia theorization cannot explain movements in this region that are demanding state recognition with its people “straddle[ing] between a kind of longing for the state and the opposite, that is, a rejection of it.” (Karlsson 2013: 329). Wouters (2012) takes a more historical approach to Scott’s theorization that hills population are marked by a centrifugal movement away from the state while a more centripetal process characterizes life in the valley state. However, Wotuers (2012) argues that studying the history of pre-modern states that existed in the Brahamaputra valley, an opposite flow, i.e., people deliberately moving from hills into the ‘state-ridden’ plains, can also be observed. Arguing against Scott, Wouters (2012:61) claims that “the history of those dwelling in the hills can equally be read as the history of their deliberate attempts to access state resources.” Both Wouters (2012) and Karlsson (2013) while offering a critique of the Zomia theorization also demonstrate how scholars interested in studying contemporary political and economic realities of the region are also tasked with developing the theoretical scaffolding that will anchor future debates and interventions. In the next section, I provide brief historical context to Sikkim and Dzongu, where my doctoral research was based, to illustrate the challenges of doing research at the epistemic margins.

The Sikkimese context

The case of Sikkim elucidates how kingdoms and princely states each with their own dynamic histories were incorporated into a larger hegemonic state and found themselves at the peripheries of political and economic affairs. Sikkim was a historical crossroads with a geographic location that from early on had been highly desirable (Balikci 2008), it’s early history was shaped by its relations with Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan. Tibet gradually emerged as an ally that heavily influenced Sikkim’s military, political, and religious life. The Sikkimese state is said to have been formed in 1642, with the coronation of the first Chogyal Phuntsog Namgyal, a prince of the Minyak house in Kham, Tibet. According to Sikkimese religious mythology, this coronation had been foretold by Guru Padmasambhava in the 8th century, who is said to have first introduced Buddhism to Sikkim (Balikci 2008). It is also believed that in the 13th century a blood brotherhood treaty was agreed upon by three groups, the Tibetan king, Khe-Bhumsa, the Lepcha ruler, Thinkung Tek and the Limbu community, at Kabi village in North Sikkim that assured native populations of the noble and upright intentions of the new Tibetan rulers (Subba 2010). Even today, the altar where this treaty was made by placing stones as witnesses is still well preserved and is known as Kabi Longchok. Several years later in 1642, Phuntsog Namgyal, a descendant of Khe-Bhumsa, was crowned by three revered monks at Yuksam, West Sikkim, which then became the first capital of the newly established Sikkimese kingdom. While much of the historical cum religious narrative of Sikkim assumes a smooth transition and acceptance of Tibetan monarchy, Mullard (2011) has argued that the first Chogyal did not as much found the Sikkimese state as he convinced several proto-states inhabited by different people groups to consolidate their territory in exchange for protection. Similar historical processes were also at work in neighboring Himalayan valleys like Nepal for example, where small settlements existed at the outer fringes of state control with significant degree of local autonomy until the intensification of state consolidation (Lim 2004).

Sikkim’s strategic location led to continual warfare with both Nepal and Bhutan which led to significant loss of territory and provided the initial impetus for this territorial consolidation. Foning (1987) in Lepcha, My Vanishing Tribe details the historical and contemporary processes of cultural erasure and argues that tribes like the Lepchas never resisted Tibetan invasion, pointing instead at systematic efforts of cultural suppression. However, Mullard (2010) believes the reality of proto-states like the Lepchas was far more complex than one of assimilation and subjugation. While Lepchas and Limbus, minority groups in present day Sikkim, formed a subject population that did indeed lose much of their cultural heritage in the wake of religious conversions, their acceptance of the monarchy was far from uniform. Mullard notes (2010) that there is at least one recorded instance of a joint Lepcha and Limbu rebellion against Phuntsog Namgyal in the 1650s however beyond this there is little evidence that can prove whether later on, these groups allied willingly or by force (Mullard 2010: 56). While the early history of Sikkim was heavily shaped by its Tibetan rulers who introduced Buddhism alongside political and feudal relations that mirrored Tibetan society, the proto-states turned feudal aristocracy were semi-autonomous and their hold over tax revenues allowed them to exert significant control over the Chogyal. It was these ethnic and political fractures that the British discovered centuries later when they entered the scene around 1814. In the early 19th century Sikkim was a politically fragmented state with a weakened monarch and the British exploited the competing interests of the feudal aristocracy to their advantage (Mullard 2011). However, it was the growing antagonism with the British that laid the foundation for a Sikkimese nationalist narrative to develop that drew on the spiritual and religious legitimacy of the Tibetan monarchy (Hiltz 2003). This narrative became further entrenched when Sikkim became a protectorate of the Indian state.

If Sikkim’s early history is obscured by both political history and religion, Dzongu, the reserve of the indigenous Lepchas, where most of my doctoral research was located, has a far more elusive history. Dzongu was accorded special protection under the Chogyal and the British, wherein non-reserve residents were not allowed to permanently settle (the exception being marriage) or purchase reserve land. This special status continues even till today under article 371 (f) of the Indian constitution that upholds the old laws and traditions of Sikkim. According to Gorer (1937) a British anthropologist who conducted ethnographic work in the Lingthem village of Dzongu, the reserve was part of the Chogyal’s private estate and was administered by one of the hereditary landlords of kazis. Foning (1987: 260) however believes that the reserve was set up by the British who were sympathetic to the Lepchas and observing their abject condition under the Chogyal decided to set up the reserve in the first half of the 19th century in order to safeguard the tribe’s culture. But it is Gorer’s version that is widely accepted and is corroborated through historical records of a royal proclamation in 1956 by Tashi Namgyal (Bhutia 2012:36). While there is not much clarity about the political impetus behind demarcating this particular geographic area as a Lepcha reserve or why Lepchas chose to settle in this location, there is a plethora of cultural and spiritual explanations behind the importance of this landscape to Lepchas. All the important mythologies and origin stories of the Lepchas can be traced back to Dzongu (Tamsang 1983; Foning 1987). The Sangha of Dzongu, a group comprising of monks in Dzongu, have highlighted that many of the important sacred places in Dzongu such as the Tholung monastery and Kishung lake have been explicitly mentioned in the Nesol a Buddhist ritual text (Balikci 2008). The idea of Dzongu as a sacred and historical landscape of the Lepcha tribe gained further traction during the anti-dam protests led by Dzongu youth between 2007-10, this movement wove together spiritual and cultural narratives with concerns around environmental protection.

This brief historical context of Sikkim and Dzongu illustrate three important concerns or challenges. First, Sikkim’s dynamic political history now exists as fragmented knowledge diluted with popular mythology. To date there is a dearth of research on Sikkim’s history that does not merely revert to its Buddhist origin story (an important exception being Mullard 2011). Furthermore, histories of areas like Dzongu and its inhabitants that can provide important insights into the marginalization and political claims of groups like the Lepcha are even more difficult to excavate. Second, despite its transition to democracy in 1975, Sikkimese polity still retains a strong feudal nature characterized by deep inequality which exists even within the same ethnic groups. For example, we find Lepcha families that at the time of the monarchy were feudal aristocrats, have retained considerable material wealth and access to political patronage. Third, we find that oral or written histories and mythologies of proto-states like the Lepcha and Limbus were completely subsumed under Buddhist Sikkimese nationalism (Hiltz 2003), which in turn finds itself subsumed under Indian nationalism. These multiple erasures of histories have led to deep-seated cultural anxieties among several groups including the Lepchas that today manifest in a variety of political and cultural demands on the state. Examining these demands from ethnic groups within the region can provide insights, however fractured and incomplete, into some of these questions and concerns.

In present day Sikkim, remnants of the former kingdom and its symbols of sovereignty are still on display, the Sikkimese national flag on taxis being the most evident of these. This kingdom nostalgia, notwithstanding, since its merger with India almost forty years ago, Sikkim has proven to be a model, disciplined state. Unlike the tragic state-sponsored violence unfolding in border areas like Kashmir and Manipur through draconian laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, Sikkim is lauded for being one of the most peaceful states in India. But for the younger generation of voters, the resentment felt by their parent’s generation towards the Indian state is slowly giving way to resentment closer to home. Despite winning numerous accolades for tourism, public works, and agriculture, for many years now Sikkim has had one of the highest rates of unemployment in the country (Labor Bureau 2015). More recently, the state has also held the unfortunate distinction of having the highest rate of suicide in India (National Crime Records Bureau 2012). Growing economic precarity especially among young people threatens to destabilize, what on the surface appears to be a tranquil state. Along with questions of income inequality and a shrinking public sector, concerns around hydropower projects, growing ethnic unrest, and natural hazards, have recently taken center stage in Sikkim. Along with political instability, the geo-physical instability of the region can in some cases provide fertile ground for radical political struggles. These contestations and demands are recent iterations of problems that are centuries old, rooted in colonial and post-colonial state practices. The contested history of incorporating these political margins into the Indian Union both informs and complicates contemporary development interventions in the region. In this final section, I end by outlining a few areas for future research in the Himalayan region that are well suited for the decolonial endeavor.

Charting a way forward for Himalayan Studies

Along with political instability, a product of the contested history of assimilation into the Indian Union, the Himalayan Mountains, ‘young’ in geological terms are still on the move, making the region extremely prone to seismic activity. In the past decade, Indian Himalayan states have witnessed a massive push for hydropower development alongside an increase in natural hazard events. My doctoral research in Sikkim examined the intersection of hazards, infrastructure, and indigenous youth politics. Since 2011, earthquakes and landslides near hydropower project sites, along with incidents of shamanic possession by angered mountain deities had raised serious doubts about the viability of hydropower projects for both locals and state technocrats. A central premise of my research is that an environmental determinist logic has informed both colonial and contemporary governance of the Himalayan frontier, casting it as inherently unstable, both ecologically and politically. In Sikkim, these colonial legacies of racialization are evident in the Indian state’s tendency to explain away disasters as inevitable, despite evidence linking hydropower development to growing environmental vulnerability. Along with interviews with indigenous activists, panchayat officials, civil society members, geologists and disaster management officials, I was able to witness how questions of economic and ecological precarity, e.g. youth unemployment and earthquakes, were often conflated and took central place in electoral debates and political rhetoric. My research highlights how indigenous knowledge systems and young people’s political subjectivities are being shaped by the contentious politics of hydropower development in the Himalayas. Here, I highlight a few research themes that are especially pertinent given the intensification of ecological, political, and cultural concerns, that require now, more than ever an ‘epistemic disobedience’ (Mingolo 2000).

First, hydropower and infrastructural development in the Himalayan region is emerging as an important research theme with both regional and geo-political significance. The ‘Look East’ policy which has identified the Northeast Region as an important economic corridor to South East Asia has important geopolitical implications for the entire region. Even as investment in the Indian hydropower industry has witnessed a gradual slowdown (Schneider 2014) both China and India are investing in the hydro futures of their neighbours, Nepal and Bhutan (Vidal 2013). Modi’s first international diplomatic visit was to Bhutan to inaugurate the India-backed 600 MW Kholongchhu project and over 75% of the energy generated by the Bhutanese hydropower industry is being supplied to India (The Hindu 2014). Conversely, diplomatic relations between India and Nepal (whose hydropower industry is being funded by China) have significantly deteriorated after India’s critical response to the country’s new constitution which is alleged to discriminate against Madeshi and Tharu groups living along the Nepal-India border (Pant 2015). The Chinese-backed Nepalese and India-backed Bhutanese hydropower industry while altering the ecological, political and cultural fates of these regions also serve as proxies for the geo-political and economic ambitions and anxieties of these powerful economic giants. Even as Indian state interventions in the Himalayan region enters a new phase of rapid expansion this is also leading to the conflation of environmental, cultural, and political movements in the region, giving rise to new forms of state dissent, political strategies and subjectivities.

Second, environmental social movements and representative politics both at the local and regional level can provide an important lens into nature of the shifting relationship between the margins and the center. Ferguson and Gupta (2002:988) have noted in the context of the resistance engendered by development projects that “new forms of transnational connection are increasingly enabling ‘local’ actors to challenge the state’s well-established claims to encompassment and vertical superiority in unexpected ways”. In the context of the Northeast Region and states like Sikkim that have a contested history of assimilation into the Indian Union along with local histories of cultural erasure and political marginalization, representative politics and social movements bring together a diverse range of concerns. The growing resentment against development is taking the form of social movements across the Himalayan region. Though fragmented at present, these movements have the potential to turn into a regional alliance of civil society concerns that can effectively check state power (Chowdhry and Kipgen 2013). However, focusing merely on instances of resistance can also obscure the “explicitly-expressed hope for the state” that can provide “functional transport, education, health services, and justice.” (Karlsson 2013: 329). Representative politics are important spaces for building political power and modes of representation for an emancipatory politics for marginalized groups.

Third, ecological and geophysical questions in the Himalayan region are especially significant area of research given the growing intensity and frequency of natural disasters in the region. In the context of hydropower development, though environmental regulations continue to be weakened under the Modi administration which means we will continue seeing negligent and shoddy construction practices, Huber and Joshi (2015: 22) note, the scale of hydropower projects have made their disastrous consequences visible even to the untrained eye. Along with resistance on cultural and political grounds, hydropower projects have run into technical roadblocks that are worsened by natural hazards and “the exceptionally high concentrations of mud, silt, and grit carried by Himalayan rivers.” (Schneider 2014: xx). While there are a several functioning hydropower projects in the region that have been able to overcome both technical and geo-physical challenges their future is uncertain in the context of climate change and its impact on the hydrology of the region. There is also growing concern over the uneven impacts of anthropogenic climate change, especially hazards and disasters, on mountainous environments and their inhabitants. Disasters and hazards even as their effects are borne unevenly by marginalized communities, can also present a limit to capitalist expansion in the Himalayan region. However, given the present political conditions it is unlikely we will see a decline in hydropower development in the region anytime soon. As Ferguson (1994:176) demonstrates in his seminal work that despite their apparent failure development projects “do, however succeed in expanding the field of bureaucratic state power in people’s everyday life” and that this “recognition that this often unintended consequence of “development” is its main achievement argues for a new politics of opposition.” Therefore, the question we must ask when it comes to Himalayan hydropower is not why they still persist despite their apparent failure but what this “new politics of opposition” should look like.

Fourth and lastly, young people across the Himalayan region are becoming increasingly politicized as they are faced with uncertain futures where despite their education they find themselves struggling to find employment. These concerns mirror the larger national context which has also witnessed a steady increased in educated unemployed youth. In the Himalayan states, young people become a focal point as they prepare for a future in which their homelands’ relation to the nation is uncertain. Ecological precarity bears directly on young people’s lives and labour, which are intimately tied to the natural environment (Katz, 2004; Dyson, 2014). Himalayan youth find themselves responding to this layering of tropes painting them as both ‘apathetic youth’ and the ‘lazy native’ (Gergan 2014). Young people’s bodies and futures are the template on which territorial, ecological and moral anxieties play out (Smith, 2013). Young people’s activism, whether in Sikkim or in Delhi, is bringing the territorial margins into the political and geographic imaginary of the Indian state, reconfiguring ideas of territory and the future. The recent student protests across India are reflective of the struggle of young people against the state led corporate colonization of their mind, bodies, and futures.

Concluding thoughts

The Himalayan region is in a state of geological and political flux that requires equal attention to historiography, contemporary concerns, and the pressing weight of future anxieties. Despite the peripheral status they are accorded, Himalayan borderlands have been central to both the discursive and material construction of the Indian nation-state (Gellner 2013). This is particularly evident in the Indian state’s representation of the Himalayan Mountains as its ‘natural’ northern frontier (Krishna 1994). In official discourse, the Himalayan borderland region is understood to be a timeless, remote, borderland whose inhabitants, like the place, are stuck in time. However, scholars have argued that contrary to understandings of the Himalayan range as an impenetrable ‘natural’ barrier, historically this range had a number of traversable passes that facilitated the flows of ideas, peoples, and materials which hark back to Silk Route traders and Buddhist missionaries to East Asia (Murton 2013; Mathur 2015). It was the cartographic logic of the British Empire region that worked to reduce this region along with its inhabitants to the fringes of Indian imperial geography. Po’dar and Subba (1991) also note that Indian anthropologists studying the Himalayan region have contributed to a “Home-grown Orientalism”, which reproduces colonial stereotypes of the region and its people as primitive and backwards. In this way the Himalayan region (including the North-East) “readily serves as a site of India’s negation – seen through neat chauvinist, nationalist categories” (Zou and Kumar 2013: 168). Any decolonizing endeavor then must contend with these existing representations that continue to influence policy and scholarly interventions in the region.

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JTICI Vol.4, Issue 3, No.2, pp. 16 to 25, October 2017

Dr.Mabel Denzin Gergan is Post Doctorate Fellow in Environmental Humanities, Georgetown University, Washington DC

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